Monthly Archives: October 2014

OK. Let’s suppose you’re having a bad day – a really bad day – and out of the blue someone tells you a joke, or you see something funny online or on TV.

You laugh.

Does this change your underlying mood? Is everything suddenly fine and dandy again?

No, of course it isn’t. But yes, perhaps it is a little.

If you’ve been eating a poor diet for too long, one slice of raw carrot isn’t suddenly going to improve your health. But multiply this effect into several days of food that’s better for you, and things will unquestionably improve.

The trick, I think, is in not turning your back on that small first chink of light in the mistaken assumption that nothing (NOTHING) will help.

Building a better state of mind is hardly ever the result of one large intervention, but a gradual process building on a range of different inputs.

A laugh here, a hug there, little conversations everywhere.

So the next time you’re mired in the glums, don’t dismiss that involuntary chuckle as meaningless.

It, and other perhaps tiny slices of positivity, are what will conspire to lift you back to where you belong.

Although I’m personally not a prolific Tweeter or Facebooker, I check both sites on a pretty regular basis to see what friends and those I follow are up to.

It’s fascinating to recognise two very different styles amongst those who are prodigious in their content generation. It seems some people are overwhelmingly positive and light-hearted in their posts, while others dwell on the negative.

And I suppose this online behaviour just reflects real life. I’m sure we all know people who appear to radiate light wherever they go, and others who cast a sense of grey glumness over everything.

Social media makes it relatively easy to avoid seeing the posts of gloom-mongers, if you wish.

Not so simple in the real world however, particularly if they’re people with whom you need to have regular contact, for one reason or another.

Although emotions can be contagious (if you’re not careful, someone else’s misery can get through to you too) it seems to help if you’re determined to see someone else’s burden as something you can help with, rather than needing to take its full weight on your own shoulders.

Just as they seemingly can’t deal with it on their own, neither will you be able to.

Setting out just now to write a few words about kindness, I decided I’d first check the origin of the word ‘kind’.

Now I probably should have thought about this before, but there’s (I suppose obviously) shared heritage between the words ‘kind’ and ‘kin’. ‘Kin’ meaning family.

So technically if I tell you that you’ve been very kind to me, I’m letting you know that you’ve treated me as if we were both from the same family – which is all rather heartening, I reckon.

Although there’s probably not enough kindness in the world, it’s a resource that’s theoretically unlimited. Unlike coal, oil or gas it needn’t necessarily run out, as long as you and I keep generating it.

In general, kindness is contagious. If you’re kind to me, I’m more likely to be kind to someone else, and they’re more likely to pass it on to others too.

Even better, kindness is a gift that rewards the giver. When you show kindness to another person, your own reward system is also given a boost.

Great acts of kindness are fantastic. But lots of little acts build up to produce a similar effect too.

So suggested American educator Thomas Payne in his ‘Teacher’s Manual’ published in the first half of the 19th century.

Persistence, he argued, was the name of the game. Stick at things and you’ll get there, was his advice.

I reckon he was largely right.

But only largely.

Whilst there are times when tenacity clearly pays off, now and again it can also be the case that a different approach is called for.

It’ll take you a long time to bang nails in with a screwdriver, for instance, but switch to a hammer and the job will be done in a jiffy.

Someone (it may have been the author Rita Mae Brown, although some suggest it could have been dear old Albert Einstein) said that one definition of insanity is doing the same thing day after day and expecting a different result.

So which way is best? Well, both probably.

Focus and perseverance have a lot going for them.

But when things really aren’t working, so does stopping, thinking, and adopting a different approach.

The other day I was pondering on how great it might be to have a personal mood trainer.

In much the same way that people appoint personal trainers to pep up their fitness, I love the idea of having a coach who’d encourage you each day to accomplish the things that can lead to a healthier and happier mind.

Any good fitness trainer begins by assessing their ‘client’, then day by day gets them doing more and more.

One more push-up. Another minute of jogging. Another length of the pool.

Over time these small steps become large leaps. Bit by bit seems the way to go.

I think a mood coach might encourage you to adopt a similar approach. I believe they’d gently push you to take one more, perhaps small, initiative today than you did yesterday. The same tomorrow.

It might be even slower than that, incremental change happening over weeks rather than days.

I reckon that the key focus should be on upping your game a little at a time.